Business

Kimi Yoshino, a veteran reporter and editor, has been named Business editor of the Los Angeles Times. During her 14 years at The Times, Yoshino has worked as a reporter for Metro and Business and covered a variety of subjects, including Disney theme parks, Anaheim and the Orange County beach cities. She fills a recently vacated position. For the last few years, she has served as morning assignment editor in Metro, and completed two reporting rotations in The Times' Baghdad bureau.

In Zedd's latest club number, "Find You," he implores the listener to "turn up your night. " The Russian-born DJ and producer's electro-house number is a quintessential dance club anthem, but there's also something more at work here than just the same old party mantra. The lyric "turn up your night" also happens to be the slogan of a new Bud Light Platinum campaign. The song (featuring vocals by Matthew Koma and Miriam Bryant) is the lead single on the "Divergent" soundtrack, and the music video for "Find You" costars bottles of the beer.

In 1958, Ed Michelson started a motion picture catering company - Michelson Food Services - and made food for the cast and crew on such classic films as "West Side Story" and "Some Like it Hot. " Michelson was one of the first to operate a food service truck on film sets, and for decades business boomed, back when virtually all the big studio movies were filmed in Los Angeles. Today, son Steve Michelson said that's no longer the case. When his father died, Michelson decided to start his own catering company, Sylmar-based Limelight Catering, which employs about 50 people and has been in business for 14 years.

If you're still hoping that Apple will one day release a TV set, you might not want to hold your breath. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane is set to release a book titled "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs," this week. In it, she recounts a moment during one of Steve Jobs' final months where the late Apple chief executive directly told his top executives that the company would not be entering the TV business, according to a Business Insider report . At Jobs' last Top 100 meeting, which is an annual summit for Apple's top executives, Jobs told his staff to ask him anything they wanted.

Scores of small businesses burned in a payroll-tax scam got some welcome news late last week when an insurance company said it would cover $3 million of their total losses. "We won't get all of our money back, but at least it looks like we will get a good chunk," said Melissa Meltzer, who with her husband, Robert, owns a Los Angeles children's fitness franchise that lost about $55,000. The Meltzers are among about 150 mostly Southern California restaurateurs, dentists, hairstylists and others who learned around Christmas that money they had deposited with LA Payroll for state and federal taxes had disappeared - as had the company's owner, Tovmas Grigoryan.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. said it plans to spin off its oil field services division into a separate publicly traded company. The news came weeks after the the oil and natural gas producer said it was pursuing strategic alternatives for the division, including a possible sale. The Oklahoma City company, which is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the U.S., has been moving to cut costs after a year of upheaval that included the ouster of Chief Executive Aubrey McClendon.

With business travel spending expected to rise this year, American Express Co. announced plans to sell half its business travel division and create a separate venture. American Express will give up 50% ownership of its global business travel division in exchange for an investment of $900 million from a group led by New York investment firm Certares. The ownership will be shared with Certares, Qatar Investment Authority, BlackRock and Macquarie Capital, according to American Express.

Last week President Obama ordered the Department of Labor to revise regulations determining which workers qualify for federal overtime protections, a move that was presented as a way to increase income for some lower-wage workers. It's not. In reality, it's a matter of basic fairness. The issue begins with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the national minimum wage for most workers and guaranteed overtime pay for more than 40 hours of work a week. But the law also allowed overtime exemptions to be set by the Labor Department.

TEHRAN - The room at the Iranian Chamber of Commerce offices was packed and noisy. At the lectern, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi encouraged dozens of merchants and manufacturers to "seize the opportunity" that could result from an easing of international sanctions. Businessmen who for years have been largely excluded from the global marketplace debated over ways to reach out to prospective investors. "Why not send a delegation of businessmen to the U.S. Congress?" proposed Mahmoud Daneshmand, a veteran import-export man. The deputy foreign minister, grasping the impracticality of that suggestion, responded in diplomat-speak: "Well, for the time being, the conditions are not right.

Robert Wagner is in a reflective mood. "Movies last forever," noted the veteran actor ("Broken Lance," "The Pink Panther," the "Austin Powers" series), but the Hollywood he once knew has all but disappeared. "I turned around, and it was all gone," Wagner, 84, said recently in Beverly Hills. Known as R.J. to his friends and colleagues, he's dapper, charming, handsome and very much cut from the same cloth as the suave characters he played in the TV series "It Takes a Thief" and "Hart to Hart," in which he and Stefanie Powers played a wealthy crime-solving couple.